So I pulled a little double duty yesterday. As I was preparing for my sermon, I took a few old school cassette tapes and started recording them onto my laptop. They combine to make up the whole Bible in Sudanese Arabic. Many folks around here listen to audio on their cell phones or have dedicated media players, but only in town, so it’s still a very small portion of the population doing this.

A shout out to Tony Evens for a few tips on some old sermon notes.

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The church is empty right now. The children are playing, without a care in
the world. The podium is set among other things like a toy. The cold, stone
walls stare at me. The soft dirt floor greets me with a warmth not found in
the western churches.

Last Sunday the area pastor for the SIC church requested that I, Taylor,
would preach the coming week. It was very kind for him to ask a week ahead
of time. In the past, I’ve had about a 5 minute warning. It’s taking me
quite a bit of time just to come up with a topic. I want to stay away from
potentially awkward cultural missteps on my parts. I really wanted to talk
on family, but as I studied more I finally came to the conclusion that
Building a Firm Foundation would be my topic. I’ve got a pretty dense
outline and I’ll be continuing to work on my filler over the next two days.

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When we first moved to Malakal I suggested we install some rain catchment
systems to try and take advantage of the rain. The town water supply is
erratic and we were going without water occasionally.

Six months later, we have a lot of sludge at the bottom of our water barrel.
It just so happened we haven’t had rain in a few weeks and town water had
not been on either so our barrel was nearly empty. So we took advantage of
the ‘low tide’ and Allison was the willing guinea pig to shimmy down inside
to clean things up.

Thanks Allison!

Posted via email from Ramblings of a Lost American

A fellow SIM missionary, Henrick, sent me a text message via Sat Phone. He
is doing well in his outreach ministry. He says ‘God is doing great
Salvation work among these people.’ Will you say a pray for him and his
ministry today?

Posted via email from Ramblings of a Lost American

  
Download now or listen on posterous

R09_0008_32Kbit_32kHz_mono.mp3 (196 KB)

A sample of the children’s choir in Sudan last week…

Posted via email from Ramblings of a Lost American

A time for the team to come together and worship…

Posted via email from Ramblings of a Lost American

Living in Africa, moving between a few countries, we deal in a lot of different currencies. Unfortunately for those of us who are American missionaries and expats, since we start with US Dollars for all transactions and currency conversions, we are hit hard by the weakening of the US Dollar. I’m sure everyone living at home in the States feels this as well in a less direct way.

As the dollar weakens, it becomes more expensive to live and work around the world, not just for us in Africa.

On the bright side, our missionaries from other countries are stronger financially because of the weak dollar. However, SIM’s financial system is in Dollars. When someone raises their money and moved to the ‘field’, their funds are held in dollars, and as the dollar weakens, their funds shrink just like ours.

At the end of the day, stability is the key. Whether the dollar goes up or down, we need stability so that our support is stable. No doubt God has provided well for us, via all of you, and He will continue to do so even in the hard times.

We thank you for your continued support!

It was brought to my attention that our RSS feed (a slimmed down way to view our blog) was truncated instead of the full blog posts. This serves as a test for now. If you click the feed link above, can you see the photo in this post?

So it seems my feed is pretty lame. It doesn’t even use links on text. Does anyone know or advise a format that should be used for RSS? I’m using UTF-8 right now.